Tracking via Bluetooth

The german IT news portal Heise linked to an interesting paper: “Anonymous Bluetooth Probes for Measuring Airport Security Screening Passage Time: The Indianapolis Pilot Deployment”. An interesting concept: Anybody who just start the Bluetooth scan on her/his notebook knows that there are several mobile phones on almost any given location with a large audience propagating a unique id to the world by their MAC address. Using this information to derive some useful facts from it (for example: Duration of the average TSA massage) looks like as one of the more worthy targets for tradeoffs on privacy vs. useful services in favor to the second one. Especially as it’s really easy to evade from this data collection: Just switch off the bluetooth function of your mobile. PS: I would like a bluetooth scanner in the aircraft itself … it’s really interesting how many mobile phones are running inflight. Such a scanner could send a vcard containing “Just switch off your fscking mobile phone”. Did that once a few minutes before takeoff … that was very effective ;)